DHCD Address Locator Tool

Guide to update files v.1

1. Introduction

The Address Locator Tool is an online tool built for the Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD). It uses information from different sources and different formats. The intention of this file is to document those sources and the intermediate steps required to make the data ready to use it as an input of the tool

This file is for internal use and is not intended to be distributed with anyone outside the organization.

2. Methodology

This section is organized in the following way: each source of information has its own section and has the code used to create the final dataset. All dataset can be downloaded as a .csv or .pdf. Each section also has an R script that has more information about each data source.

2.1. DHCD Payment Standards

DHCD provides payment standards for 23 Metropolitan areas in the State of Massachusetts. All the cities and towns within each area share the same payment standard for units with 0 to 4 bedroom. The basic geographical unit is the boundaries of a city or a town. To update the DHCD Payment Standards file, there are several intermediate steps required to make the information useful.

2.1.1. DHCD Metropolitan Areas

As mention above, DHCD provides payment standards for 23 Metropolitan areas in the State of Massachusetts. The list of DHCD Metropolitan areas is given by the following file. To make this data easy to handle, it has been translated into the following Excel file. All our work regarding DHCD Payment Standard will take this file as the base file.

## Reading layer `ma_municipalities' from data source `/Users/lauticantar/Google Drive/DHCD-tool/data/shapefiles/ma_municipalities' using driver `ESRI Shapefile'
## Simple feature collection with 351 features and 5 fields
## geometry type:  MULTIPOLYGON
## dimension:      XY
## bbox:           xmin: -73.50821 ymin: 41.23875 xmax: -69.92751 ymax: 42.88678
## epsg (SRID):    4326
## proj4string:    +proj=longlat +datum=WGS84 +no_defs

To check that the original file covers all the cities and towns across the State of Massachusetts, we can do the following test. We downloaded a shapefile of all the municipalities in Massachusetts from MassGIS and compare the number of cities and towns between the original file and one downloaded. The original file is not complete. There are 351 municipalities in Massachusetts, but the original file only has 318. There are 33 less. The following map shows that most of the missing cities and towns are from Franklin County.

2.1.2. DHCD Regional Administering Agencies

DHCD divides its operation in 8 Regional Administering Agencies (RAA). A list of the cities and towns in each RAA is available at this link. In this section, this information is added to the Original File.

2.1.3. Zip codes and counties data

In order to add the zip codes to the file from point 2.1.2, we retrieve information regarding the zip codes from the following website Zipcodestogo.com. That information has been cleaned and merged with the original file. Since the Original File is missing cities and towns from Franklin County, many zip codes (and cities and towns) that do not have a DHCD Metropolitan Area assigned.

2.1.4. DHCD Payment standards

DHCD Payment Standards are given by the following file. The following table has the same information but in a file format more compatible with the work flow of this document.

2.1.5. Final join

With the output of Section 2.1.3 and Section 2.1.4, we do a final join. This file is one of the inputs that the ALT is going to use.

2.2. HUD Small Area Fair Market Rent standards

The HUD Small Area Fair Market Rent are available to be downloaded from the following link Small Area FMRs¹.As stated in their webpage, Small Area Fair Market Rents (SAFMRs) are FMRs calculated for ZIP Codes within Metropolitan Areas. This file is one of the inputs that the ALT is going to use.

2.3. GreatSchools.org data

Greatschools.org provides information about school quality and several other social and demographic indicators. The Address Locator Tool uses its data. To collect this data, we are going to use a “scraper” written in Python.

The final dataset has information for 5457 schools all across the state. You can download the data here:

Since our data has the latitude and the longitude of each school, the following map shows the location of it in the state.

2.4. diversitydatakids.org - Kirwan Institute Child Opportunity Index

The diversitydatakids.org - Kirwan Institute Child Opportunity Index is a comprehensive sociodemographic indicator that will be used as a proxy of the socio-demographic status of each census tract. The Child Opportunity Index combines 19 separate component indicators into a single metric: Very Low, Low, Moderate, High or Very High. For more technical information, click here.

The COI Index is calculated for 1368 census tracts, divided into four different metropolitan areas. In order to get the information for each one of the metropolitan areas, you can download the data from the following links:

• Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH
• Providence-New Bedford-Fall River, RI-MA
• Springfield, MA
• Worcester, MA

The final dataset is the following:

2.5. The Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) Data

From the (Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing)[https://www.hudexchange.info/resource/4868/affh-raw-data/] data we are going to use the following five indicators:

• School Proficiency Index
• Labor Market Engagement Index
• Environmental Health Hazard Index
• Low Transportation Cost Index
• Low Poverty Index

Please note that values are percentile ranked and range from 0 to 100. The higher the score, the better. For more technical information, please reference here.

The final dataset is the following:

2.6. MassDOT data for buses and bus stops data

The data has been retrieve from the following links:

• Berkshire Regional Transit Authority Bus Routes
• Berkshire Regional Transit Authority Bus Stops
• Brockton Area Transit Authority Bus Routes
• Brockton Area Transit Authority Bus Stops
• Cape Anne Transportation Authority Bus Routes
• Cape Anne Transportation Authority Bus Stops
• Cape Cod Regional Transit Authority Bus Routes
• Cape Cod Regional Transit Authority Bus Stops
• Franklin Regional Transit Authority Bus Routes
• Franklin Regional Transit Authority Bus Stops
• Greater Attleboro Taunton Regional Transit Authority Bus Routes
• Greater Attleboro Taunton Regional Transit Authority Bus Stops
• Lowell Regional Transit Authority Bus Routes
• Lowell Regional Transit Authority Bus Stops
• Martha’s Vineyard Regional Transit Authority Bus Routes
• Martha’s Vineyard Regional Transit Authority Bus Stops
• Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority Bus Routes
• Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority Bus Stops
• Merimack Valley Regional Transit Authority Bus Routes
• Merimack Valley Regional Transit Authority Bus Stops
• Metrowest Regional Transit Authority Bus Routes
• Metrowest Regional Transit Authority Bus Stops
• Montachusett Regional Transit Authority Bus Routes
• Montachusett Regional Transit Authority Bus Stops
• Nantucket Regional Transit Authority Bus Routes
• Nantucket Regional Transit Authority Bus Stops
• Pioneer Valley Transit Authority Bus Routes
• Pioneer Valley Transit Authority Bus Routes
• Southeast Regional Transit Authority Bus Routes
• Southeast Regional Transit Authority Bus Stops
• Worcester Regional Transit Authority Bus Routes
• Worcester Regional Transit Authority Bus Stops

## Reading layer `Mass_buses' from data source `/Users/lauticantar/Google Drive/DHCD-tool/data/shapefiles/Mass_buses' using driver `ESRI Shapefile'
## Simple feature collection with 2368 features and 22 fields
## geometry type:  LINESTRING
## dimension:      XY
## bbox:           xmin: -73.37251 ymin: 41.24406 xmax: -69.95501 ymax: 42.91335
## epsg (SRID):    4326
## proj4string:    +proj=longlat +datum=WGS84 +no_defs

## Reading layer `Mass_buses_stops' from data source `/Users/lauticantar/Google Drive/DHCD-tool/data/shapefiles/Mass_buses' using driver `ESRI Shapefile'
## Simple feature collection with 15992 features and 5 fields
## geometry type:  POINT
## dimension:      XY
## bbox:           xmin: -73.372 ymin: 41.24403 xmax: -69.96195 ymax: 42.91025
## epsg (SRID):    4326
## proj4string:    +proj=longlat +datum=WGS84 +no_defs

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1. Effective April 15, 2019↩